PARTNERS AND MARRIAGE
by Eduardo Jose E. Calasanz
I have never met a man who didn't want to be loved. But I have seldom met a man who didn't fear marriage. Something about the closure seems constricting, not enabling. Marriage seems easier to understand for what it cuts out of our lives
than for what it makes possible within our lives. When I was younger this fear immobilized me.
I did not want to make a mistake. I saw my friends get married for reasons of social acceptability, or sexual fever, or just because they thought it was the logical thing to do. Then I watched, as they and their partners became embittered and petty in their dealings with each other. I looked at older couples and saw, at best, mutual toleration of each other. I imagined a lifetime of loveless nights and bickering days and could not imagine subjecting myself or someone else to such a fate.
And yet, on rare occasions, I would see old couples who somehow seemed to glow in each other's presence. They seemed really in love, not just dependent upon each other and tolerantof each other's foibles.
It was an astounding sight, and it seemed impossible. How, I asked myself, can they have survived so many years of sameness, so much irritation at the others habits? What keeps love alive in them, when most of us seem unable to even stay together, much less love each other?
The central secret seems to be in choosingwell. There is something to the claim of fundamental compatibility. Good people can create a bad relationship, even though they both dearly want the relationship to succeed. It is important to find someone
with whom you can create a good relationship from the outset. Unfortunately, it is hard to see clearly in the early stages.
Sexual hunger draws you to each other and colors the way you see yourselves together. It blinds you to the thousands of little things by which relationships eventually survive or fail. You need to find a way to see beyond this initial overwhelming sexual fascination.
Some people choose to involve themselves sexually and ride out the most heated period of sexual attraction in order to see what is on the other side. This can work, but it can also leave a trail of wounded hearts. Others deny the sexual side altogether in an attempt to get to know each other apart from their sexuality. But they
cannot see clearly, because the presence of unfulfilled sexual desire looms so large that it keeps them from having any normal perceptionof what life would be like together.
The truly lucky people are the ones who manage to become long-time friends before they realize they are attracted to each other. They get to know each other's
laughs, passions, sadness, and fears. They see each other at their worst and at their best. They share time together before they get swept up into the entangling intimacy of their sexuality. This is the ideal, but not often possible. If you fall under the
spell of your sexual attraction immediately, you need to look beyond it for other keys to compatibility. One of these is laughter. Laughter tells you how much you will enjoy each others company over the long term. If your laughter together is good and healthy, and not at the expense of others, then you have a healthy relationship to
the world. Laughter is the child of surprise. If you can make each other laugh, you can always surprise each other. And if you can always surprise each other, you can always keep the world around you new.
Beware of a relationship in which there is no laughter. Even the most intimate relationships based only on seriousness have a tendency to turn sour. Over time, sharing a common serious viewpoint on the world tends to turn you against those who do not share the same viewpoint, and your relationship can become based on being critical together.
After laughter, look for a partner who deals with the world in a way you respect. When two people first get together, they tend to see their relationship as existing only in the space between the two of them. They find each other endlessly fascinating, and the overwhelming power of the emotions they are sharing obscures the
outside world. As the relationship ages and grows, the outside world becomes important again. If your partner treats people or circumstances in a way you cant accept, you will inevitably come to grief.
Look at the way she cares for others and deals with the daily affairs of life. If that makes you love her more, your love will grow. If it does not, be careful. If you do not
respect the way you each deal with the world around you, eventually the two of you will not respect each other.
Look also at how your partner confronts the mysteries of life. We live on the cusp of poetry and practicality, and the real life of the heart resides in the poetic. If one of you is deeply affected by the mystery of the unseen in life and relationships, while the other is drawn only to the literal and the practical, you must take care that the distance does not become an unbridgeable gap that leaves you each feeling isolated and misunderstood.
There are many other keys, but you must find them by yourself. We all have unchangeable parts of our hearts that we will not betray and private commitments to a vision of life that we will not deny. If you fall in love with someone who cannot nourish those inviolable parts of you, or if you cannot nourish them in her, you will find yourselves growing further apart until you live in separate worlds where you share the Business of life, but never touch each other where the heart lives and dreams. From there itis only a small leap to the cataloging of petty hurts and daily
failures that leaves so many couples bitter and unsatisfied with their mates.
So choose carefully and well. If you do, you will have chosen a partner with whom you can grow, and then the real miracle of marriage can take place in your hearts. I pick my words carefully when I speak of a miracle. But I think it is not too strong a word.
There is a miracle in marriage. It is called transformation. Transformation is one of the most common events of nature. The seed becomes the flower. The cocoon becomes the butterfly. Winter becomes spring and love becomes a child. We never
question these, because we see them around us every day. To us they are not
miracles, though if we did not know them they would be impossible tobelieve.
Marriage is a transformation we choose to make. Our love is planted like a seed, and in time it begins to flower. We cannot know the flower that will blossom, but we can be sure that a bloom will come. If you have chosen carefully and wisely, the
bloom will be good. If you have chosen poorly or for the wrong reason, the bloom will be flawed.
We are quite willing to accept the reality of negative transformation in a marriage. It as negative transformation that always had me terrified of the bitter marriages that I feared when I was younger. It never occurred to me to questionthe dark miracle
that transformed love into harshness and bitterness. Yet I was unable to accept the
possibility that the first heat of love could be transformed into something positive that was actually deeper and more meaningful than the heat of fresh passion. All I could believe in was the power of this passion and the fear that when it cooled I would be left with something lesser and bitter.
But there is positive transformation as well. Like negative transformation, it results from a slow accretion of little things. But instead of death by athousand blows, it is growth by a thousand touches of love. Two histories intermingle. Two separate beings, two separate presence, two separate consciousness come together and share a view of life that passes before them. They remain separate, but they also become one.
There is an expansion of awareness, not a closure and constriction, as I had once feared. This is not to say that there is no tension and there are no traps. Tension and traps are part of every choice of life, from celibate to monogamous to having multiple lovers. Each choice contains within it the lingering doubt that the road not
taken somehow more fruitful and exciting, and each becomes dulled to the richness that it alone contains. But only marriage allows life to deepen and expand and be
leavened by the knowledge that two have chosen, against all odds, to become one.
Those who live together without marriage canknow the pleasure of shared company, but there is a specific gravity in the marriage commitment that deepens that experience into something richer and more complex.
So do not fear marriage, just as you should not rush into it for the wrong reasons. It is an act of faith and it contains within it the power of transformation.If you believe in
your heart that you have found someone with whom you are able to grow, if you have sufficient faith that you can resist the endless attraction of the roadnot taken and the
Partner not chosen, if you have the strength of heart to embrace the cycles and seasons that your love will experience, then you may be ready to seek the miracle that marriage offers. If not, then wait.
The easy grace of a marriage well made is worth your patience. When the timecomes, a thousand flowers will bloom.
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I post this here, not only because I do not agree to such. Of course, I have my own life and philosophy, not need of such idea and no time to waste on such topic while there are things in life that is really worthy of long pondering. I just can't believe while some innocent people are dying, some people are thinking about such things.
Everything happened within last few hours remind me of myidentity.
It reminded me of the blood in my every breath.
This wrath, this fury, all I am taking in... and I am accepting it... it is a justified anger...
It is justified to drive it out...
And I will drive it out...
I feel pity for Kim. I am sorry for his family. and I am sorry that I am still not the person that I should be!!!
Believe me... when things are done, I will be stepping up as a person representing Korea, that is just, caring, and mostly very much loved by me, and all other Koreans.
Hear the cries, feel the anger. This is Korea, that I was born.
South Korea Confirms Death of Man Held by Terrorists in Iraq
Published: June 22, 2004
he South Korean government today identified the body of a 33-year-old contractor who was believed to have been killed by an Iraqi militant group.
Earlier today, Al-Jazeera television reported that the militant group had beheaded its South Korean hostage, saying it had received a videotape showing that the hostage, Kim Sun-il had been executed, wire services said.
Today, on Al-Jazeera's website, a headline said in Arabic: `South Korean hostage in Iraq killed."
Mr. Kim, 33, worked for a South Korean company supplying the Unites States military in Iraq, the South Korean government has said. An Arabic speaker and evangelical Christian working in Iraq as a translator for a Korean firm supplying goods to the United States Army, Mr. Kim was abducted last week in Falluja, about 30 miles west of Baghdad.
Al-Jazeera, which broadcast only a portion of the tape, said the execution was carried out by the Al Qaeda-linked group Monotheism and Jihad.
If the network's report is correct, he would be the third hostage held by militant groups to be executed on videotape since the Iraq war began a year ago in March.
On Friday, Paul M. Johnson Jr., an American who worked as an Apache helicopter engineer employed by Lockheed Martin, was beheaded in Saudi ARabia by a cell group of Al Qaeda.
At a White House briefing, Scott McClellan, the spokesman, said he had just learned of Mr. Kim's execution.
"There simply is no justification for those kinds of atrocities that the terrorists carry out," he said. "You know, we've seen some of the barbaric nature of the terrorists recently when it comes to an American citizen that was killed in Saudi Arabia, and it is a reminder of the true nature of the terrorists."
In the case of Mr. Kim, his captors had demanded that South Korea cancel plans to raise troop levels in the conflict in Iraq. They had threatened to execute Mr. Kim on Monday if the South Korean government did not meet their demands.
On Monday, the deputy foreign minister of South Korea, Choi Young Jin, said that his government would not change its plan to send 3,000 soldiers to Iraq despite the kidnapping.
The minister made the announcement after government officials held an emergency meeting to discuss the abduction.
"There is no change in the government's spirit and position that it will send troops to Iraq to help establish peace and rebuild Iraq," Mr. Choi said at a news conference.
Foreign Minister Ban Ki Moon had said the government would campaign for the hostage's release.
Al Jazeera television on Sunday broadcast a video of the hostage begging for his life and pleading with Seoul to withdraw troops from Iraq, the Associated Press said.
The kidnappers, who identified themselves as belonging to a group led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, gave South Korea 24 hours to meet their demand or "we will send to you the head of this Korean."
In the videotape, the man is heard screaming in English, the A.P. said: "Please, get out of here. I don't want to die. I don't want to die. I know that your life is important, but my life is important."
Muhammad al-Saadi, a staff member at the network's headquarters in Qatar, told the A.P. that the tape was mailed to Al Jazeera's bureau in Baghdad.
South Korea announced Friday that it would send the 3,000 soldiers to northern Iraq beginning in early August to assist the multinational force. The country already has 600 military medics and engineers in Nasiriya
